Andrew Yang’s Idea of Meritocracy Is Impossible and Dangerous
There should be no ‘right’ way to be an immigrant in order to enter into the United States
During the immigration section on the second night of the July Democratic presidential debates, candidate Andrew Yang, a tech entrepreneur and a graduate of Phillips Exeter, Brown University, and Columbia Law School, said, “My father immigrated here as a graduate student and generated over 60 U.S. patents for GE and IBM. I think that’s a pretty good deal for the United States. That’s the immigration story we need to be telling. We can’t always be focusing on some of the distress stories.”
Like Yang, I am also the child of immigrants. Unlike Yang and his family, my parents and I, and many other immigrants of the global south and their children, are not products of elite bastions of education. Thus, his comments greatly repulsed me. Yang constructs an elitist and capitalistic dichotomy of worthy and unworthy immigrants instead of a monolithic humanitarian argument that immigrants are human beings who deserve the right to a decent home, adequate medical care, and quality education.
Yang’s statements on July 31 argue for a meritocratic immigration system, but meritocracy cannot exist in a global order of U.S. destabilization and intervention in…
